On Our Minds: Navigating the Changing Landscape in Google Search for Marketers

This past May, Google rolled out their AI-driven Search Generative Experience to most users. This new product affects changes in the layout of Search Engine Result Page components as well as how advertisers will need to think about and optimize their website content to stay relevant in search results. Google describes the new offering as letting Google “do the searching for you.” So, what’s the difference with AI-powered Google search and good old fashioned Google search as we knew it before? A new Gemini model customized for Google Search, utilizing multi-step reasoning, planning and multimodality.

Google now has the AI-driven content on top of the search engine result page components, (usually) above ads and traditional organic search results. Its primary components are narrative content addressing the search query, a series of content links used to source the narrative content, and suggested follow-up questions. Optimizing your website for both inclusion and being characterized positively on this top AI-driven section represents an evolutionary challenge for advertisers that is related to, but distinct from, traditional search optimization tactics.?

Website content is increasingly secondary to a combination of content from sources Google considers relevant. Departing from an SEO approach, which favors optimizing content for specific keywords, this model tends to reward strategies that have content across funnel stages and narrow use cases. Data-backed content is often favored over narrative content. Since Google is creating richer, holistic answers, having richer content increases odds of inclusion in answers to search queries. Since the questions searchers have don’t necessarily fit into the tidy keyword buckets, Google is tending to favor similarly elastic content that addresses and resembles its users’ questions.

For example, a sample query on an “appropriate Broadway show for a family with 3 children ages 5-10” pulled in information from Broadway.com and the New York Theater Guide, but also Common Sense Media, which weighs in on the appropriateness of entertainment for children, of which Broadway shows are buy one component.

Like all new products in the digital marketing industry, we expect that this product will continue to evolve, both to better serve a positive user experience as well as to benefit the company behind it, likely from advertising revenue.

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